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Masculinity and Nation: a Study of Gandhi and Savarkar

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Masculinity and Nation: a Study of Gandhi and Savarkar IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 19, Issue 7, Ver. V (July. 2014), PP 36-44 e-ISSN: 2279-0837, p-ISSN: 2279-0845. www.iosrjournals.org Masculinity and Nation: A study of Gandhi and Savarkar Rashmi Gopi Department of Law, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, Affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi, India. Abstract: This research paper focuses on how ideas of masculinity and nation are interlinked in the political thoughts of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. To understand these aspects, the author has taken five significant areas to concentrate. They are the colonial context, education, religion, significant others and morality. The work emphasises the fact that masculinity is constructed, plural and fluid. Through the lives and thoughts of Gandhi and Savarkar we realize that experience and experiments with masculinity can change within a lifespan of a person. The same applies to the idea of nation. Both Gandhi and Savarkar envisioned the nation in terms of their understanding of masculinity. These ideas are relevant even today as the contemporary Indian politics plays with the very same ideas of Gandhi and Savarkar. This research paper is a product of in depth study of original works of Gandhi and Savarkar. It also draws its strength from various theories on masculinity and nation. The author has taken constructivist approach, that is, to take both ideas of masculinity and nation as products of socio-cultural discourses of a particular context. The work explores how a particular hegemonic masculinity based on upper caste-upper class Hindu men in the colonial context influenced both Gandhi and Savarkar but their experiments with it were different. Keywords: Gandhi, Masculinity, Nation, Savarkar I. Introduction The classical texts make it clear that the masculine individual is treated as universal, as representative and as everyman. The justification for this exercise is that man by nature has both power of reason and sense of justice, which are central to political life. Therefore women and children are being concluded by their husbands and fathers respectively (Pateman 1980)[1]. If this is the case of classical texts then liberal theory and its critics fail to overtly justify why they favour the masculine individual. The masculine character of the individual remains unacknowledged and instead, the individual is implicitly presented as sexless (Pateman 1985)[2]. The feminist scholars exposed both gender chauvinism and gender blindness prevailing in different schools of thought. These works illuminated the role of women in politics by chronicling their participation and leadership and also uncovered the mechanisms of women‟s exclusion from political organizations, movements, decision making institutions and processes. These efforts „to bring the women in‟ to the study of politics has often involved a conflation of the terms gender and women. Gender is not exclusively about women, it is about men, it is about many combinations between them and beyond them. While the emphasis on women by feminist scholars has begun to fill a critical gap in the study of politics, I felt an urge to explore a less travelled path, that is, to problematise the monolithic political category of men. The problematisation of the „men‟ began with the arrival of masculinity studies in 1970‟s. Before that there was no shortage of writings on men, as we said before, but they took masculinity as natural and monolithic. Books on men were many but books explicitly on men were few (Morgan 1992)[3]. Then what aroused interest in studying men and masculinities? Three major developments have generated this interest. The primary push has come from the particular historical combination of feminist studies with feminist politics, carrying in the theory of marginal, subaltern genders that produced gay and lesbian studies. This path broke with the presupposition of masculinity as a given structure of power, proposing „powerless masculinities‟ as decisive for knowing the gendered world. The second impetus has been the discourse around HIV/AIDS. The questions that arose from the patterns of the spread of the disease among all-male groups instigated researchers to interrogate their assumptions of heterosexuality as an intelligible orientation that defined and fixed male sexuality. The third thrust can be located in the relation between academics and activists while academicians uncovered subalternity of the female gender, activists and policy makers tried to redress this subalternity. Arranging empowerment and reducing powerlessness made it clear that gender sensitive policy cannot exclude the involvement of men from the strategies of empowering women. How men‟s inclusion is to be encouraged requires a better understanding of how men view themselves, in relation with women and in relation with other men (Chopra et al. 2000)[4]. This interest in studying the political category of „men‟, the questions and answers related to what is masculinity, how it is formed led to evolution of different schools of thought. Some schools of thought take www.iosrjournals.org 36 | Page Masculinity and Nation: A study of Gandhi and Savarkar masculinity as natural, universal and fixed [i] whereas others take it as constructed, context based and fluid. This paper takes the stand that masculinity is constructed. It is product of socio-cultural discourses. With changing contexts, the way masculinity is constructed differs and thus there is no single masculinity but masculinities. As masculinities are constructed and context based, at a given time and place certain masculinities attain more acceptance in society. The variations within masculinity leads to hierarchisation between masculinities. R.W. Connell introduced the concept of hegemonic masculinity in 1983 and in so doing firmly placed masculinity within power politics of gender. [ii] Hegemonic masculinity provides a conceptual tool for examining how other relations of power and authority – racial, colonial, economic, geographic and international – may also be expressed in terms of sexual identity, including antagonistic or subordinate versions of masculinity (Dudink et al. 2004)[5]. In Gramsci‟s usage „hegemony‟ is not dominance through a special organization of force. For him hegemony is about creating consent for a certain social order through a web of institutions, social relations and ideas. A fully extended hegemony must rest on active consent, on a collective will in which various groups in society unite. Hegemony provides a more coherent and systematic world view which not only influences the mass of population but serves as a principle of organization of social institutions (Bottomore 1983)[6] . Hegemony acts as yardstick to measure what is right and proper. It becomes part of conscious thought by which most people in society order their perceptions of reality. Applied to the sphere of gender relations, hegemony denoted the unequal social relations which empower certain groups of men and their model of masculinity to be the only way of being a man, such that there appears to be no other way of being a man. Hegemonic masculinity thus not only stratifies public life but also private life. The successful maintenance of hegemonic masculinity clearly depends, as Connell puts it, on the ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality (Connell 1995)[7] . The objectives of this paper are to explore how masculinities of Gandhi and Sawarkar were shaped under the condition of colonialism, where their masculinities lie in the hierarchy of masculinities, what are the points of convergence and divergence between them and finally how their ideas about masculinity influenced their ideas about India as a nation. Consequently, to have a better understanding of ideas of Gandhi and Savarkar this paper takes five points of reference: the colonial context, the role of education, the influence of significant others, the impact of morality and the role of religion. These points are not isolated but interlinked and had a combined impact on both Gandhi and Savarkar. II. Colonial Context Gandhi escaped colonization of mind under British rule. Gandhi had the intense intelligence to see hollowness of projected monolithic masculinity of West and East, that is, West‟s masculinity as matured, aggressive, civilized as against East‟s masculinity as childish, passive and barbarous. He rejected binary opposition between West and East (Nandy 1983)[8]. Thus he broke the back of the basic justification for colonialism, i.e., civilizing mission of superior-matured men of West over inferior-childish men of East. Gandhi further pushed this argument to conclude that development of an alternative masculinity is possible which is based on fluidity between, rather than opposition between, West and East, Public and Private, Masculinity and Femininity. Gandhi‟s masculinity took qualities from both West and East. West‟s emphasis on punctuality, self- control and sexual distance/abstinence influenced Gandhi‟s idea of masculinity. East‟s way of clothing (Khadi wearing), vegetarianism, spirituality, religion to be both private and public identity of a person and emphasis on non-violence shaped Gandhi‟s idea of masculinity. Gandhi‟s idea of masculinity acknowledged presence of all in public discourse irrespective of gender, caste, class, region and religion as witnessed in his advocacy
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